Yandex Partners with Google to Change Russia's Display Ad Market

25 feb 2014

The global advertising market has been experiencing some serious technology-driven transformation for the past few years. The common trend is the growing popularity of automated web-based services offering media buying and data management capabilities on the demand side and best-value selling opportunities on the supply side. All packed in a convenient, user-friendly interface with comprehensive statistics reporting tools.

Yandex launched its own Real-Time Bidding system for auctioning ad impressions to advertising systems in March 2012. Yandex.Direct and myThings were pioneer participants in the auction, which were later joined by Tinkoff Digital, the developer of Russia’s first RTB platform, and LaModa, one of the most popular fashion e-retailers in Russia.

In line with the current industry trend, companies develop their own Demand-Side Platforms, often powered by the real-time bidding technology, to mediate ad marketing between buyers and sellers, and sharing participants for mutual benefit.

We’re now happy to announce our partnership with Google, which will facilitate global networking and open competition in digital marketing. Through Google’s subsidiary DoubleClick, the company’s advertising clients will now have access to one of Russia’s largest advertising inventories offered by publishers in Yandex’s Advertising Network, while the advertising clients of Yandex will be able to bid for ad displays in the global inventory of DoubleClick AdExchange partners. Both systems are powered by the real-time-bidding technology, which allows advertisers and publishers to maximise their advertising revenues and cut costs through efficient audience targeting and automated, algorithm-based bidding.

The current arrangement between Yandex and Google only relates to display advertising, and does not cover text-based contextual advertising. It also reflects the industry’s movement towards technology-based, in contrast to human mediation-based, trading – a step forward in the evolution of digital advertising. Two of the major players on Russia’s digital market are merging their advertising technologies and feeding grounds to empower both advertisers and publishers. Google and Yandex complement each other in terms of user data, audience-targeting and bid-optimisation, with Yandex’s machine learning technology MatrixNet providing fluidity and precision to behaviour-based targeting, and Google’s cutting-edge ad display optimisation giving all market participants the best value for their money.

Having already signed the bilateral partnership agreement, we're now at the technical stage of implementing this project. First and foremost, this agreement is expected to dramatically increase advertising inventory available to the clients of both companies whose respective advertising pools in the CIS countries don't overlap much. And, of course, pouring a new batch of feed into the fish-tank gives a new kick to competition and boosts the quality of advertising space – the better is the inventory, the more desirable it is for buyers, the higher bids it generates in a real-time bidding auction.

The RTB-based advertising market on the whole benefits from a larger number of bidders and sellers, each with their own targeting goals and display opportunities. The more conditions the system takes into account when matching ads to publishers, the more fine-tuned the ad targeting is and the better optimised the bids are. Accessibility of Yandex’s inventories for Google’s advertising clients, and Google’s inventories for Yandex’s advertisers, supports the idea of and the principle behind real-time bidding – each auction participant has an equal chance to reach their goal.